Letters from an Atheist, Part 4

I'm enjoying my email dialogues with Jake. He is caring and respectful while still making his arguments against Christianity.

His latest post made the point that it's ridiculous for Christians to attribute accidental "blessings" to God. He gave this example:

Recently a construction blast sent a 20-ton boulder rumbling toward a church in MA, but the boulder came to rest one foot from an outside wall.

The church, called Grace Ministries, feeds thousands in the community each year out of its food pantry. Many folks in the neighborhood agreed that the Lord intervened to save the church from certain demolition by the giant rock.

Jake thinks such nonsense actually hurts the cause of Christ. After all, while one church was spared by God on this day, 25,000 children around the world died of malnutrition.

Like many atheists, Jake likes to make common sense arguments. This is a good one because it pits suffering children against God!

In response, I noticed that this was neither a scientific argument or a strictly logical one, but rather, highly speculative.

I decided to point this out to Jake -- the fourth time I'd critiqued his methodology.

In my email to Jake I wrote that you'd have to know a lot about God to know which projects he's working on, whether large or small, starvation or saving one church. It's quite possible he's active in both. A skeptic would have no way of knowing.

* * *

In this exchange I could have tried to make a case for God's sovereign control over all the events in the universe, including the "staying" of the rolling boulder in question. But that's a tall order.

Instead, I chose a smaller project (again), attempting to show Jake that his argument is subjective and speculative. That's enough for now.

graphic credit: http://goo.gl/yV7a4L

See you next week!

I am at InterVarsity's "Chapter Focus Week" at Cedar Campus (Upper Peninsula of MI) this week, along with a dozen Macalester students.

Letters from an Atheist, Part 3

Jake the atheist in Texas continues to engage me in email dialogue.

You may remember that one of his first objections is:

Honesty and realism demand that we put away childish beliefs and superstitions and engage in the hard work of coming to grips with the human condition -- and improving it.

My main strategy with all Jake's arguments so far has been to question his method. 

I've offered almost no argumentation for the truth of Christianity. Nor have I countered his assertions.

Rather: method, baby, method.

Other apologists may take a different approach. But I find that challenging Jake's methodology is helpful for leveling the playing field. 

Atheists tend to think their methods for discovering truth (rational, scientific, common-sense) are superior to those of the theist (faith-based, experiential, wishful thinking). 

So if I can show otherwise -- that at the very least we're on even footing -- a major gain is achieved.

Back to the argument. I wrote to Jake that my own experience has been just the opposite: that when I walk closely with Jesus my view of myself and the world is more honest, more realistic.

Now we're in a standoff, right? That's what I want. Jake's experience of honesty and realism versus my experience of honesty and realism. 

Ergo: Jake's method of finding truth -- in this case, via experience -- is no better than mine. 


graphic credit: http://goo.gl/ljmZq2

Letters from an Atheist, Part 2: Deities

Last week I told of how Jake, an atheist I met in Texas, emailed me a nice summary of his position, and how I questioned the credibility of his sources.

One of his objections to Christianity is that history is littered with so many prophets and deities -- including many accounts of virgin births, miracles and resurrections -- that in humility we ought to suspect that when Jesus comes along, "we might, once again, be going through the same old drill . . . Another day, another deity."

Essentially, Jake is saying that the presence of many false deities should cause us to question the existence of the real thing.

There are several ways I could have responded to this objection.

I could have said that in Christianity it's not so much that we discovered God but that God revealed himself to us. I like this argument but this early in the game it's too ambitious.

Rather, I said to Jake that if we find it challenging to discern the real god among all the false gods, it says more about human limitations than about God. It's our issue, not God's.

In fact, when you stop and think about it, the presence of pretenders or lack thereof has zero causal power over the real thing.

* * *

OK, what I'm trying to do here with Jake is slow . . . down . . . the . . . dialogue.

Jake has made a major assertion. I could have countered it with one of my own (There's no evidence that all these deities ever existed! But there's tons of evidence that Jesus was real . . . ). 

Instead, I chose a smaller project. I questioned his method. He seems to have jumped hastily to a conclusion -- that pretenders negate the real thing -- and I'm merely pointing that out.

Later, I can make my own case for Christ. That will come in time.

graphic credit: http://www.shodalap.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Mithras.jpg